WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch The global politics of ugly feelings: pessimism and resentment in a mimetic world Brighi, E. This is a pre-publication version of a book chapter to be published in: Stevens, T. and Michelsen, Nicholas (eds.) Pessimism in International Relations Provocations, Possibilities, Politics Cham, Switzerland Palgrave. pp. 101-117. The final version is available from the publisher at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21780-8_7 The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the URL of WestminsterResearch: ((http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). In case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail [email protected] The global politics of ugly feelings: pessimism and resentment in a mimetic world Elisabetta Brighi School of Social Sciences University of Westminster [email protected] Abstract Negative emotions are not what they used to be. As the world edges closer and closer to the brink of a dark political dystopia, sentiments of disenchantment such as pessimism and resentment stand out as dominant moods of our age. Despite being once endowed with a critical and creative potential, today these ‘ugly feelings’ sustain forms of politics that are ambivalent and equivocal. Against the background of a highly mimetic social ontology, where affects mutate into memes at dazzling speed, these sentiments of disenchantments are appropriated by the political right as well as the left, hanging dangerously between reaction and emancipation. The chapter provides a diagnosis of their re-emergence, highlighting their common phenomenological matrix, their shared dysphoric and non- cathartic nature, and their ambivalent political work. The world at a loss Contemporary world politics seems to be hang on the brink of dystopia. The looming threat of environmental catastrophe, the ongoing humanitarian crisis linked to mass migration and a never-ending global economic recession stand in the background of a politics gone rogue. Resurgent across much of the world, fascism has made considerable inroads in the Americas, in Asia and in Europe. After a phase of gradual erosion, democratic institutions are now shaken to their core by mass-movements and street protests seeking to redefine the perimeters and parameters of political space. Finally, global social transformations are threatening long-established identities, and their entitlements, while an increasing number of political systems are actively attacking freedoms and progressively restricting rights. The sense of crisis, failure and loss is palpable across much of the world. In 2015 the media colossus Bloomberg decided to rename its yearly financial forecasts as ‘The Pessimist’s Guide to the Year’. Notably, the scenarios featured in the 2019 edition were generally deemed to be particularly worrying not because of their fantastical nature – but rather, because they had all already ‘happened in the past. Just not all at once’.1 This sense of doom and gloom is further mobilised and capitalised upon by world leaders. On 20 January 2017 the US President Donald Trump delivered his inauguration speech by depicting a landscape worthy of Edgar Allan Poe, in which through a glass darkly he presented America as a scene of ‘carnage and catastrophe’, threatened at every corner by enemies within and without.2 Indeed, Trump channelled and popularised a now widely-held dark fantasy – one that reflects an annihilation anxiety in which the world braces itself from falling into an abyss of dread and extinction.3 Meanwhile, in countries such as the US, life expectancy amongst the once prosperous white middle class continues to drop due to the 1 staggering rise of the so-called ‘diseases of despair’ – drug abuse, including the opioid crisis, alcoholism and suicide.4 All this marks a striking departure from the mood that characterised the final decades of the twentieth century and the turn to the new millennium. Three decades after the world- changing events of 1989, the much-trumpeted triumph of liberal democracy, the affirmation of the neoliberal economic model, and the expansion of the zone of freedom all seem a long distant memory, a broken illusion, a lost paradigm. The failure of the liberal agenda has ushered much of the world into a phase of disenchantment and retreat. The optimism of the end of the Cold War has thus given way to the pessimism of the twenty-first century. Tellingly, the current global crisis has been readily compared to that of the 1920s-30s when, in the words of EH Carr, the ‘liberal utopia’ collapsed under the weight of its own illusions and the dark realities of power politics, nationalism and genocidal violence (re-)emerged from the underground.5 And yet, the current moment also resonates with earlier crises; indeed, it harks back to that sense of disorientation, confusion, and dread that nineteenth- century existentialists expressed towards a society transfigured by modernity, with its dazzling yet profoundly alienating ways of life.6 What these historical moments have in common is the coming to the surface of ‘ugly feelings’, negative collective moods, sentiments of disenchantments, which have significant yet ambiguous political import.7 Resentment and pessimism stand out as particularly important, and sufficiently ‘ugly’, contemporary dispositions. This chapter provides a reading of the global political implications of their current re-emergence. To do so, I firstly examine the common characteristics of these ugly feelings, highlighting their shared dysphoric roots, their latent and non-cathartic nature, and their ambivalent emotional work. Secondly, I expand on the political consequences of this ambiguity, noting how ‘negative emotions’ can serve rather different political purposes along the conservative-progressive, reactionary- emancipatory spectrum. The next two sections focus on resentment and pessimism respectively, contrasting these negative emotions but also highlighting their overlaps and embedding them in the current political scenario to show how they are mobilized in contemporary global politics. The chapter will conclude with an assessment of the mimetic effects of the circulation of negative affects, considering the strategies, tactics and antidotes at our disposal in the process of stemming the global contagion of ugly feelings. Sentiments of disenchantment as ‘ugly feelings’: locating pessimism and resentment Before dissecting pessimism and resentment qua sentiments of disenchantment, it might be useful to offer a preliminary definition of these dispositions that highlights their common phenomenological matrix, namely the experience of failure and loss. If resentment can be understood as the emotional response to the experience of being unfairly treated, namely a response to a failure of justice – and the loss of trust, or face, that ordinarily comes with it – pessimism is the mental and emotional disposition that acknowledges and anticipates the possibility of failure and loss as inherent, or inevitable, in human affairs. Instantiations of loss and failure include the fallibility of the human condition, the loss of existential meaning, and/or the failure of those personal or collective programmes designed to achieve greater happiness in one’s life or, indeed, in civilisation at large.8 Pessimism and resentment are 2 likely to become dominant collective moods when loss and failure become dominant are rife in the historical conjuncture: in such a world, disenchantment prevails. As I argue in the following two sections, there is a lot that distinguishes resentment and pessimism. And yet, because these two dispositions stem from a similar problematique – failure and loss, and the disenchantment that comes with these – in this section I consider them together. The value of doing so is also to highlight a number of revealing overlaps and similarities, especially when it comes to their political extensions and implications. To start with, both pessimism and resentment can be characterised as dysphoric dispositions (as opposed to euphoric ones).9 Dysphoric emotions are difficult to bear in that they come with or convey a sense of unease, pain, dissatisfaction, displeasure. People experiencing pessimism or resentment are, if one sticks to the Greek origin of the term dysphoria, literally ‘feeling bad’ about some distressing, discomforting or disappointing reality. They are in a ‘bad place’, ie., in an emotional dystopia of some kind. These bad feelings, or bad places, however, are distinct from specific psychological conditions such as depression or anxiety – which they can indeed lead to, though not necessarily. Secondly, pessimism and resentment are both semantically and syntactically negative. On the one hand, they are saturated with socially stigmatizing meanings and values, associated as they are with unhappy stereotypes and characterisations (such as the pessimist’s proverbial black cloud hanging over their head). On the other, they are organised around trajectories of repulsion rather than attraction. Pessimism and resentment, in other words, seek to create or maintain distance from disappointing states of affairs by moving away from them, or standing against them, rather than